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Blue Jays shut out again by Cardinals

It took arguably the best pitching staff in baseball to do it, but the Blue Jays’ red-hot offence was considerably cooled this weekend by the St. Louis Cardinals, who held the Jays scoreless for the second game in a row on Sunday.

The 5-0 loss, in front of a sold-out crowd on Jose Reyes bobblehead day, capped Toronto’s first series defeat in nearly a month, snapping a streak of seven consecutive series victories.

Once again, the story of the game was the Cardinals’ starting pitcher. Jaime Garcia held the Jays to just three scattered singles, just as his predecessor, Shelby Miller, did on Saturday.

The Jays have scored more runs this season than all but one other team and they lead the American League in hits, but the Cardinals’ pitchers silenced their bats in a hurry — and they did it without their two best starters, Adam Wainwright and Michael Wacha.

For the Cards, one of two teams that have made the post-season in four of the last five years, it was their 12th shutout of the season — they have blanked the opposition nearly every fifth game. The Jays, meanwhile, have won eight shutouts this year. So while it’s just a couple of games in June and the Jays remain comfortably in first place, the last two days may be instructive to a Toronto club that now has post-season aspirations. Good pitching usually beats good hitting. You see it every October when the games count the most.

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Despite all the bagels on the board this weekend, this Jays lineup, if healthy, will continue to be one of the better offences in the league. The question likely to plague them for the rest of the season is whether they can pitch well enough to compete with baseball’s heavyweight contenders.

Over the last week, they have. Heading into Sunday’s game, Jays starters had allowed three or fewer runs over their last seven games. That streak also ended Sunday as Drew Hutchison allowed all five St. Louis runs in just three innings — the shortest non-injury start of his career.

The 23-year-old right-hander, who has looked by turns both dominant and middling this season, struggled early, allowing the Cardinals to take a 4-0 lead in a bat-around second inning.

Long reliever Todd Redmond stepped in admirably and pitched five scoreless innings of relief.

“That’s what the long guy is supposed to do,” Redmond shrugged. “Go out there and keep ’em in the game and have a chance to win.”

But Garcia, who earned 15 groundball outs — all to the left side — owned the inner part of the strike zone, with help from home-plate umpire Manny Gonzalez, against a Jays lineup stacked with righties against the St. Louis southpaw.

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In his previous outings, Hutchison showed considerable poise and composure by not letting games get away from him and containing any damage. On Sunday, he did not.

“I did a bad job of controlling the situation,” he said afterward. “I fell behind some guys and then hung some pitches. I made mistakes and they got hit.”

One quirk of Hutchison’s first 13 starts is his dramatic home-road splits. In five starts at home this year he has a 9.26 ERA, compared to a 2.03 mark in eight road starts. Jays manager John Gibbons said it’s “hard to put a finger” on an explanation for that.

“Some guys are like that,” he said.

Granted, it’s a small sample and in 2012 Hutchison’s home-road splits were the reverse, so maybe there isn’t anything to it. The splits that may be more telling for Hutchison is regular versus extra rest. In six starts with the usual four days off — as was the case Sunday — he has a 5.94 ERA. In seven starts with extra rest, however, he owns a 2.62 mark.

Hutchison, who underwent Tommy John surgery in his rookie season two years ago, had his last start bumped back by a couple of days in order to give him extra rest, something the club has said they will continue to do at various times this season.

“He’s healthy, but in a lot of ways he’s probably still building up after a year off,” Gibbons said. “But they swung the bats good today. They came after him. I don’t think it was that he was so bad, they attacked him pretty good.”

While the Jays have no doubt played well over their recent stretch — winning 20 of their last 26 games — the depth of their starting pitching remains anything but certain with 98 games left in the schedule, and right now they’re counting on two 23-year-olds in their first full seasons in Hutchison and Marcus Stroman. Between now and the July 31 trade deadline, the calls to add a veteran will only grow louder.

The Minnesota Twins, who visit the Rogers Centre on Monday, might be just the tonic for the Jays’ suddenly anemic offence. Twins starters own the worst earned-run average in the league.

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